Women Artists and Writers : Modernist (Im) Positionings

by Elliott,B. J.

• ISBN13: 9780415053662
• ISBN10: 0415053668
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1994-10-12
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In this beautifully illustrated and provocative study, Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace reassess women's literary and artistic contribution to modernism. Deploying the work of Pierre Bourdieu to identify the cultural field of modernist production, Elliot and Wallace disclose the modernism, emphasizing the avant-gardist symbolics of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, the professionalism of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, and the construction of female genius by Gertrude Stein and Maurie Laurencin. Closely and carefully attending to the particularistic and, at times, highly self-conscious constructions of the identity of women artists, Elliot and Wallace survey the various possibilities and constraints of interpellation, the cultural logics of their positions, as well as their relations vis-a-vis male artists. Not simply a study of the cultural field of modernism, this text provides a trenchant and compelling look at the way disciplines, such as English Literature and Art History, are implicitly andinsiduously instituted through their location of the formal qualities of the objects of cultural study. Breaking the divisions which pervade most of the major scholarship on the period,Women Artists and Writersprovides a critical and interdisciplinary intervention in and around the field of modernist cultural production.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Whose Modernism?	p. 1
Fleurs du Mal or Second-hand Roses?: Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the "originality of the avant-garde"	p. 31
Professionalism, Genre, and the Sister(s') Arts: Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell	p. 56
The Making of Genius: Gertrude Stein and Marie Laurencin	p. 90
Mediating Modernism: Djuna Barnes and Nina Hamnett	p. 122
Conclusion	p. 152
Notes	p. 167
Bibliography	p. 184
Index	p. 196
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